Jamaat leader sentenced to death in Bangladesh for war crimes

Dhaka: A top leader of fundamentalist Jamaat-e-Islami party was sentenced to death on Wednesday by a special tribunal in Bangladesh for crimes against humanity during the independence war against Pakistan in 1971.

Abdus Subhan, in his early 80s, was sentenced by the three-member International Crimes Tribunal-2 here, saying six of the nine charges against him were proved beyond doubt.

"He (Subhan) will be hanged till death," chairman of the tribunal Obaidul Haque said as he read out the 165-page verdict.

Subhan was the last of the high-profile figures to be tried since the start of the war crime trials in 2010 against Jamaat leaders, who were opposed to the country's independence.

According to the chargesheet, Subhan guided Pakistani soldiers to kill over 300 villagers at his home district in northwestern Pabna. The tribunal found that Subhan himself killed many of them.

He was convicted for murder, loot, abduction, confinement, arson and torture.

Subhan had fled the country at the end of the independence war and returned home after the August 1975 coup which toppled the country's post independence government.

He was indicted in December last year, an year after his arrest on charges of war crimes along with other Jamaat leaders.

Since Bangladesh launched the war crimes trial, the two special tribunals, set up by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina's secular government in 2010, have handed down death penalties to 13 people.

Only one of them, Jamaat's joint secretary general Abdul Quader Mollah so far has been executed to far.

About three million people were killed by the Pakistani army and their Bengali-speaking collaborators during the liberation war when Jamaat was opposed to Bangladesh's independence siding with the Pakistani junta.

The verdict came as two Jamaat activists were killed in western Jessore by police in a predawn "encounter".